Some kids dream about writing poetry and fiction, about becoming writers. Not me. I didn’t know what I wanted out of life, but writing was never one of my dreams. But here I am. Guess I was just stupid. To be brutally honest, I wanted to be a pole-vaulter. My abiding secret. But I was such a lousy pole-vaulter in high school why brag about it. But the idea of jumping, vaulting upside down into blue sky, never left me. I wrote about this in my first book, Oppenheimer Is Watching Me, a cultural history of the Cold War. There’s a chapter dedicated to pole-vaulting, me soaring absurdly into thin air. That’s when it occurred to me there may be little difference between writing and jumping.

Most recent book . . .

First memoir. The Cold War through a boy’s eyes. The true meaning of paranoia.

Literary history of radio. Even though an academic thingy, a pretty cool book.